Command to be used to launch an agent program, which controls the agent computer and communicates with the master. Jenkins assumes that the executed program launches the agent.jar program on the correct machine.

A copy of agent.jar can be downloaded from here.

In a simple case, this could be something like "ssh hostname java -jar ~/bin/agent.jar". However, it is often a good idea to write a small shell script, like the following, on an agent so that you can control the location of Java and/or agent.jar, as well as set up any environment variables specific to this node, such as PATH.

#!/bin/sh
exec java -jar ~/bin/agent.jar

You can use any command to run a process on the agent machine, such as RSH, as long as stdin/stdout of this process will be connected to "java -jar ~/bin/agent.jar" eventually.

In a larger deployment, it is also worth considering to load agent.jar from a NFS-mounted common location, so that you don't have to update this file every time you update Jenkins.

Setting this to "ssh -v hostname" may be useful for debugging connectivity issue.